The move towards a DevOps methodology for your call center is no small undertaking. There's no quick and easy road to creating an agile environment, but there are some key considerations that will help you along the way.
In this article, we've listed seven useful tips that will guide you towards a sustainable DevOps transformation.
#1 Communication
Innovation can sometimes be met with resistance. Over time, individuals or teams working in a more traditional environment may have found their own methods of tackling challenges and performing the necessary tasks that move work through the pipeline. There is a crucial need to clearly communicate the value that automation, and the DevOps model as a whole, is going to bring to the business.
Create a program that describes how the transformation is going to be rolled out and how it will affect different areas of the organization. Highlight how these new integrations and processes will improve everyone's experience within their roles and facilitate collaboration between teams.
#2 Culture changes
Technology, systems, and processes aside, the successful implementation of DevOps begins with people.
Start by addressing your organization's culture and ensure that everyone understands the benefits of adopting this model.
Finding your champions early on will help you to capture momentum with your DevOps implementation and ensure that the desired practices are applied. To successfully deploy DevOps within a call center, it's essential to dismantle the notion that teams operate in silos. Eliminating blame and encouraging collaboration will help everyone to work towards the common goals of the business.
#3 Testing
The success of DevOps largely relies on continuous, automated testing. Without it, teams cannot release changes at the required velocity because there may be too many latent issues cropping up after new products are launched into the live environment.
Continuous testing reduces the risk of failure and covers the network at scale – unlike manual tests, which are often inaccurate and a drain on company resources.
Be sure to equip your team with the necessary integrations to perform regular tests and pull up shareable reports. Feedback is an essential component of DevOps, and real-time data from testing will help organizations to make fact-based decisions.
#4 Roles
While you're shifting the focus in your company to a culture where agile responsiveness is prioritized, it's also essential to define the roles and expectations you have for each team. Promoting ownership and responsibility will help everyone in your organization to feel a sense of involvement while also gaining insight into how their role impacts the customer's experience (CX).
DevOps isn't an isolated change that affects the more technical aspects of your infrastructure; its functionality will depend on the involvement of the entire contact center and key stakeholders.
But, as we briefly touched on in the previous point above, it may be a good idea to appoint a transformation team along with its own leader. This pioneering team can set an example and pave the way for others to follow once they are able to see the benefits in action.
#5 Align your objectives
There's a reason why you've decided to implement DevOps – often, several reasons. To get everyone on the same page, you should align each team member's role with the goal you're trying to achieve as a business.
Creating a shared vision is key to reaching targets timeously and cost-effectively. To show stakeholders how you're going to align your objectives with your DevOps implementation, be sure to specify how you're going to track and measure progress to show how each process is moving you closer towards your goals.
This can be done through implementing tools that enhance transparency and taking a proactive approach to creating a learning environment within your organization, as opposed to one where siloed teams work under pressure and fear failure.
#6 Create the right processes
Whilst a DevOps methodology implementation doesn't have the rigid structure of a standard project, it does require processes to be in place so that developers, QA and operations staff work to a common standard in the pursuit of continuous improvement.
Automation is one of the critical enablers for DevOps. Having the tools and systems in place to ensure that your team is supported with relevant and accurate information will help to create a process for tackling bugs and a protocol for communicating and deploying changes.
#7 Streamline your environment migration
As code passes through different stages of the deployment pipeline, bottlenecks are likely to be encountered if your environment isn't set up to support easy access and autonomy for the various teams working on a product or script.
The chain of communication between development, staging, production, and QA can often break or suffer friction. For this reason, you should look to having a central repository that gives everyone an overview of progress and helps to avoid having to rework elements. Such initiatives will help to improve your continuous delivery pipeline and manage changes in the build environment before any bugs arise post-deployment.
If you'd like to learn more about how you can implement a DevOps infrastructure into your call center successfully, we've put together a practical guide that includes more in-depth technical information on the points we've covered here. Download your copy for free and start planning a successful organizational shift towards improved processes through continuous improvement and automation.
